Last Sunday, just after midday, I had what I consider to have been an amazing experience. I was down at the east end of Coopers Beach with a wheelbarrow collecting seaweed for the garden. A stream of people arrived at the beach near where I was working. Their numbers grew. I noticed one of them was the pastor of one of our local churches. Next a friend of ours left the group to run over to me. I hadn’t seen her for some months. She exclaimed excitedly that her daughter, whom we’ve known since she was primary school age, was about to be baptized.

I dropped everything to join the group of people, many of them familiar faces, as they approached the water’s edge. The tide was low and the surface was choppy. A cool south-westerly buffeted us. Just as the first of three baptism candidates entered the water shivering in a wetsuit, a flock of several hundred petrels, began feeding all around us. According to Te Ara, The New Zealand online encyclopedia, ‘Petrels are remarkable birds. Most spend their lives at sea and come to land only to breed.’

In the eleven years we’ve lived at Coopers Beach, I have never seen petrels anywhere near the beach. I’ve observed them in the distance from Tokerau Beach. That’s all. This time they were so close you could almost touch them. Even more remarkable was that the birds were sitting on the water’s surface, periodically submerging their heads to catch small fish. The motion was exactly that of the people being baptized.

Less than a minute after the third person was baptized the birds had left. It was almost as if they had collectively responded to the obvious excitement of the group of baptismal candidates and their supporters. It felt like a blessing to me.

I don’t believe the above incident was a coincidence. I can’t prove this but there are many books covering the scientific phenomenon outlining the interconnectedness of all beings and things, which goes a long way towards explaining such synchronous events. Dr. Bruce Lipton has two books in our little library: The Biology of Belief and Spontaneous Evolution. Joseph Jaworski has penned an inspiring read called Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. And, of course, anything by Rupert Sheldrake is worth reading.

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The author's true, exciting and serendipitous journey through the wilds of Papua New Guinea, the Himalayas, around the planet and into the heart of life guaranteed to change the way you see the world.